


An open book

by epersonae



Series: The Journal-Keeper [11]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Beach year, Bob - Freeform, F/M, Gen, Learning disability, Post-Canon, Reading, Starblaster years, The Magnus/Lucretia could be platonic if you see it that way, audiobooks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-05 03:53:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12786387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epersonae/pseuds/epersonae
Summary: Magnus also has a coin. Lucretia discovers a secret. Julia worries about memory. Leon has concerns. Angus is excited to share his favorite stories.





	An open book

**Author's Note:**

  * For [weatheredlaw](https://archiveofourown.org/users/weatheredlaw/gifts), [bluemoodblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluemoodblue/gifts).



> This was spawned out of a discussion in the WDA discord; huge thanks to @weatheredlaw and @bluemoodblue for letting me take it away and run with it. Also to @hops for talking through some of the ending and for being the best sounding board a writer could have. Written also thinking of EA, and all the shit she went through as a kid. Love you, kiddo.

He puts his hand in his pocket. The coin is in there, and as always, the texture of it, the weight in his hand, is indefinably calming. 

It's not actually a coin. He doesn't know exactly what it is, or even exactly where he got it. Magic, he knows that much, and that's just because a traveling wizard told him once. He could have guessed; there's a spot on it where if you press it, the coin makes a noise. And maybe that could have been mechanical, but it's magic. 

It doesn't do anything else, though. Just makes a soft staticky hum. Like if you took a woman's voice and dissolved it into nothingness. 

Now that he's somewhere with more magic - and heck, seems like there's a lot of magic up here on the moon - maybe he can find out a bit more about it. He didn't want to hog Leon's time, more important that Taako find out about that weird umbrella. That actually does stuff. This coin, it just…. It's just a thing he keeps in his pocket. For comfort. 

* * *

“MAGNUSSSSS!”

She looks up at him with an impassive face but smiling eyes. 

“Yes you are.”

“Aw Lucy. You're not surprised.”

“You've only been doing that for four solid months.”

He sits down beside her and claps a hand on her shoulder. 

“That means you're learning! You're going to be ready for — ”

“For the plane where everything trying to kill us jumps out shouting  _ Magnus _ ?”

He chuckles and leans up against her, looking over her shoulder. 

“Whatcha reading?” he asks. 

“Short stories.” She shrugs. “I pretty much have them memorized by now, though.” She puts a hand on his knee. “Hey, you have a nice voice. Maybe you could read me one and I'd put my head in your lap?” 

He looks away and blushes, unaccountably flustered. 

“Naw, um, naw. You know ‘em, maybe you could read to me.”

She turns, removes the hand from his knee and places it on his cheek. She can feel his jaw twitching nervously. Gently, slowly, she pulls him to look at her. 

“Magnus?”

He takes a deep breath, frowns. He's still avoiding her eyes. He shakes away her hand and turns his head out towards the ocean. She closes her book and sits very still. 

“You know, they do…they did a lot of tests when you join the institute,” he says. She nods, but he shakes his head. “The tests I had were…. They were different, Luce.” He shrugs. “You know, meat shield. But there’s some stuff they test everybody on, and wow. I thought they’d just fail me out.  _ Huh, this boy can’t even read? _ ” His voice is tight, and she touches his knee again. “But nope.  _ Don’t need to read to stand in front of some wizards and take a hit, son. _ ”

“I’m so sorry.”

He scoffs. “What are  _ you _ sorry for?”

“Well, first off, I’m sorry I can’t blast those assholes in the face for treating you like that.” He laughs again, a bit more easily this time. “And, well...I’m sorry I didn’t notice sooner. I should’ve.”

His face scrunches up apologetically.

“Been keeping it to myself a long time even before...” he says.

She eyes him over, a calculating expression on her face.

“Would you  _ want _ to?”

He hums, still not looking at her.

“You don’t have to take me on like, I’unno, a project?”

She laughs.

“If it would make things fair, you can teach me fighting. I’m ready for surprises, but what am I gonna do next, huh?”

Now he looks at her, and he laughs.

“Alright, okay, yeah. Let’s do this thing.”

* * *

She’s walking through the halls of the Starblaster one last time before sealing the door, then sealing the grass-covered surface above it. Just one last time. Supposedly to make sure there’s nothing she’s forgotten, nothing that she’ll need for the work ahead. That’s what she told Maureen, anyway.

But she walks through slowly, too slowly, running her hands along the walls, touching each door, brushing her fingertips over the old kitchen countertop. She goes in their rooms, dusty with disuse -- how long has it been already? How much longer will it be? -- and drinks in the last sight of all these familiar things.

She finds a few items: some notes of Barry’s from the making of the Relics, her favorite ink from a plane long swallowed by the Hunger. Not really anything she actually needed.

She certainly doesn’t need to sit on Magnus’s bed for ten minutes, just breathing in the mostly-faded scent of him.  _ He’s happy in Raven’s Roost _ , she reminds herself,  _ you’re just being sentimental. _ She doesn’t need to go through the chest at the foot of the bed, touching all of the things she couldn’t let him take with him.

She flips through the coins she made him over the years, the stories she read out loud for him to read when they were apart. They’re all numbered, and she reads the numbers like a mantra. Until there’s a skip. Number eleven, missing. And her heart skips a beat, and then another.

She was so careful. Nothing that would twinge a memory that they couldn’t have. Yet, somehow, he must have that coin? Or worse, it had dropped out there somewhere in the world.

She sits on the bed heavily, letting out a long sigh, cursing whatever carelessness had let this slip. Her eyes dart around the room; is there anything else she’d forgotten? No, everything is just as it should be. A space waiting to be reoccupied. A room full of things, empty of the person who had gathered them.

* * *

“So where’d it come from, hon?”

Like with so many things that Julia asks him about, he just shrugs. They’ve both acknowledged over the years that Magnus’s memory is a hot mess. She’d absolutely never say so, but she’s pretty sure he must’ve taken a bad hit to the head before he came to Raven’s Roost, back when he was still a mercenary or … well, that’s one of the things, isn’t it? He’s even a little foggy about what he was doing before he came to the Roost, before he started apprenticing with her dad.

But he’s so cheerful and matter of fact about all of it that she figures it isn’t worth pushing too hard. Still, he’s got this coin, and it’s definitely not of a design she’s ever seen, and they get a lot of interesting metalwork from all over.

She turns it over and over in her hands, looking at the intricate filigree, the delicate design. The number on one side: 11. Who the hell makes coins in denominations of eleven? But maybe it wasn’t money? It looked too fancy to be money, anyway.

“Does it  _ do _ something?” she asks.

He hesitates.

“Well, it just…. It does this…?”

He touches the number, and a soft hissing noise comes from the coin. It reminds her a bit of the one time that her family went to the shore, when she was little, and she put a seashell to her ear. A distant sound of nothing in particular. 

“Huh. That’s it?”

“Yup. It’ll do that for a while, like, I’unno, an hour? And then it stops, and if I tap it again, it’ll do it again.”

“And you don’t know where you got it or who gave it to you?”

He shrugs. She sighs. She’s lived in Raven’s Roost her entire life. She’s known all the same people, all the same places, all the same everything. If she’s forgotten something, someone around her will be able to remember it for her. It’s probably part of what she loves about him, that he’s spent his young life out there, doing things, having adventures, but sometimes it’s almost too much of a mystery.

“I just feel better when I have it on me,” he says, taking it back from her, running his fingers around the edge, looking at it with that soft meditative smile.

“Well in that case….” She folds his hand around the coin and then kisses his cheek.

“Thanks for putting up with me,” he says. “I love you, Jules.”

“Love you too, Mags.”

* * *

They’ve spent weeks on this together, and he’s obviously frustrated. His eyes follow her finger across the page, but he can’t make them focus. He can’t stick with it.

He looks away and he huffs, his shoulder sagging, his nostrils flared.

“Luce, it just — it’s not — I can’t.”

She touches his arm.

“It’s okay, baby, I swear.”

He knows a few more words: he’s been able to read and write his own name for years, has to in order to sign things, and now he’s got the whole crew’s names down. He can read and write a few simple sentences; he can follow along with her favorite story if there’s absolutely nothing else to distract him. But it never stops being a horrible effort.

He looks at her, and he’s on the verge of tears, holding them back with a clenched jaw.

“Lucretia, what if I’m just dumb?”

She shakes her head and sighs.

“Magnus, you’re not dumb.” He winces. “How many times have you thrown me so far? And I  _ know _ you’re holding back.”

“Yeah, but —”

“No buts. That absolutely does not come easy to me, trying to figure out how to fight, physically, I mean, with my  _ body _ ?”

He laughs at her horrified tone.

“And you’re  _ so good _ at it.”

“But it’s just, y’know, meat shield stuff.”

She scoffs and then looks at him again, like he’s a puzzle she needs to reassemble.

“Okay then, so whatever,  _ meat shield _ . Which takes plenty of brains, oh Magnus mine. But what about how you learned Elvish so well that you can play word games with  _ Taako _ ? Without any classes, any training, just picking it up from those two, who can barely say a straightforward sentence, let alone talk slow enough for even an ordinary student?”

He shrugs again and she has to grit her teeth in frustration. She pinches the bridge of her nose, then slams the book shut and sets it on the blanket. She hops to her feet, holds out her hands to him.

“C’mon, we’re gonna do something different.”

He gives her a skeptical look.

“Don’t question me, Magnus Burnsides.”

He stands without taking her hand, which she frowns at, and so she turns and runs down to the beach, without looking back to see if he’s following. Although of course he does follow and quickly catches up.

“Alright, big guy, grab me a stick,” she says.

He looks at her quizzically.

“I said don’t question me,” and she smacks him on the ass, just a little tap, but he gives an exaggerated yelp. He goes back up into the trees, returns with a stick, holds it out to her. She grins.

“We’re going to write in the sand,” she says. And for hours, they write giant letters together with sticks; sometimes she holds his hands while he writes, sometimes he holds hers. When he gets frustrated, they take a break, and wrestle, and he tries to teach her special fighting stances, which she finds as baffling and opaque as he finds letters.

They’re laying on the ground, panting, exhausted, too tired to laugh, even, when Taako walks up the beach and flings water droplets at them out of his hair. The salt stings her eyes and she flings a handful of sand in his general direction without otherwise moving.

“What’s all this, my dudes?” he says, gesturing at the disturbed sand all around them, covered as it is with the scuff marks of their fighting and the remnants of giant letters. “You kids had a hell of a day without cha’boy, might need to get Lup on chaperone duty.” He pokes at Magnus’s shoulder with his toe.

She tips her head sideways to look at Magnus.

“You cool to tell him?” she asks.

He says, “Eh, sure why not?” which seems like progress to her. He explains it to Taako, hesitantly but simply, and Taako is entirely unfazed, having apparently figured it out cycles and cycles ago.

“I thought maybe it was a humans thing?” he says with a half-shrug. “You chucklefucks got short lives, why learn shit you might not need? But my dude, you wanna make some words, cha’boy’s gonna help you figure out making some words.”

It turns out that reading and writing in Elvish actually comes easier to Magnus, which once again seems entirely obvious to Taako and Lup. Barry, who of course eventually gets roped into “Project Get Maggie A Write”, since he had a few years as a TA back at the university, has some sort of honest-to-goodness scientific explanation about letter shapes and phonemes or something.

“Elvish is just the good shit,” says Taako around a mouthful of fresh bread. He and Lup high five.

“Of course,” says Barry, “but perhaps there's a way we can figure out audio learning. Might as well work to your strengths.”

* * *

He sets it down onto the podium in front of the artificer.

“So can you…. Um, yeah, do you know what this is?”

Leon puts on his reading glasses and picks up the coin. He holds it close and flips it back and forth, hemming and hawing as he examines it. Magnus shifts from one foot to the other as he waits.

“Well, it’s not anything in my book, I don’t think.” He flips open his reference guide, jumps between sections, mumbling and shaking his head. “No, not that, nope, uh-uh.” He hands it back to Magnus.

“Where’d you get it?” he asks.

As always, Magnus shrugs.

“Picked it up somewhere, don’t remember exactly anymore.”

“It does have a magic aura, illusion magic maybe? Does it  _ do _ anything?”

“Just makes a noise, if I tap the number here.” He does it, and the soft crackling sound fills the artificer’s quiet chambers. “And that’s it.”

Leon’s frown deepens. “That is quite unusual,” he says after a long pause. “Do you mind if I make some notes?”

“No prob, just...mind if I take it with? It’s kind of my, uh, my thing?”

Leon is writing quickly on a blank piece of parchment, long scrawling notes and quick sketches as he glances as the coin. He nods absentmindedly.

“Oh, yes, go ahead,” he says. “I’m just going to…” and he circles the “11” in his sketch before handing the coin back to Magnus.

“Thanks,” and Magnus slips the coin back into his pocket, holding it tight.

* * *

The coin is Davenport’s idea. After several cycles, Magnus has gotten to a point where he is functionally literate, as far as everyone is concerned, but reading never really stops being a trial. And yet, he loves stories, and since Lucretia brought so many books, she takes to reading them to him. But so often they’re apart: he’s out on the hunt for the Light, she’s holding down things on the ship; she’s with Davenport negotiating with some petty noble, he’s fending off monsters.

Davenport knows Magic Mouth, well enough to startle the others with cryptic statements that appear to come out of the bulkheads, and Barry is clever with magical devices. The two of them present the box of coins to Magnus as a gift for his birthday. He claps his hands with delight after trying out talking to one, then listening to it play back.

He gives half of the coins to Lucretia, so she can record his favorite stories, and the other half to Taako, who doesn’t read from books, but fills them with elven legends, dirty jokes, and eventually, his full catalog of aphorisms.

Later, Magnus sits and records again when Lucretia reads aloud to Fischer; sometimes she reads to Fischer from her own journals, so the creature can hear stories about the adventures they themselves have had over all these many cycles. After that, playing back from the coin reminds him of Lucretia and Fischer both; he tells her many times that for him, it’s better than reading. He can hold things better in his mind when he hears her voice.

* * *

He sits in the cafeteria after everyone has finished lunch. He gave the kiddo a hard time about it, but he appreciated the gift of the book. At the same time, he's such a slow reader that he's embarrassed about being seen. The cafeteria is quiet during off hours. 

His tongue sticks out a bit as he runs his finger along the line of words. This is a good story, he thinks, but it's so hard to follow unless he's alone like this, reading one word at a time, no distractions, and even then…. 

He sighs, looking off at the windows at the far end of the cafeteria. Julia used to read to him, sometimes. It's been long enough that he's not sure he remembers the sound of her voice anymore. He thinks that he'd give anything to hear it again. 

“Hello sir! Are you reading the Caleb Cleveland book I gave you?!”

He smiles shyly at Angus, who's suddenly appeared behind his left shoulder. Angus’s expression is eager, waiting for Magnus to share his enthusiasm for the fictional boy detective. 

“Uh, yeah. Um, it's real good, Django.”

Angus slides onto the bench beside him. 

“Oh, you're at the very beginning still sir. You haven't even gotten to where Sir Bungleton -” he puts a hand over his mouth “- oh, sorry sir, I almost gave away the ending!”

Magnus can't help but grin. 

“S’alright, Ango. I'm not as smart as you are, kid, takes me a while to get through even a really good story.”

Angus fixes him with an oddly familiar look, something calculating, like Magnus is a pile of puzzle pieces that the little boy is trying to put together. His tongue sticks out between his teeth. 

“Okay,” he says more or less out of nowhere. “Okay, yeah.” He slides the book away from Magnus and squints down at the page. Page three. Angus looks at Magnus again. 

He takes a little hesitant breath and his brows furrow. 

“Would you…. Would it be okay if…. I could read it to you if you want…?”

Magnus sighs.

“I mean, I don't mean to say, sir, I don't want, I'm sorry if I was rude sir….” Words spill nervously out of the boy until Magnus puts a hand on his shoulder. 

“That'd be real nice, kiddo.”

* * *

She opens the note from Leon and immediately her eyes go wide. There's a sketch, a rough one to be sure, but quite recognizable. He's circled the number 11, with an arrow to a note “significance of this number??? source of sound”

Along with his sketches is a short note. 

_ Madame Director,  _

_ The reclaimer Magnus Burnsides showed me this object which has been in his possession for some time.  _

_ I fear that it may have some relation to the Red Robes. When pressed it makes a sound reminiscent of the voidfish static.  _

_ I thought I should bring it to your attention in case further action is required.  _

She runs her fingers over the drawing, the familiar shape rendered so simply. He's had it this whole time. She doesn't know whether to be grateful or frightened. 

She stands from her desk, balls up the note and stuffs it into a pocket of her robes. Almost without thinking she walks back to her private office, dispelling the alarms as she goes. 

The child floats in its tiny tank, waving tendrils at her and humming. She takes the note out of her pocket, smooths it back open. Resting her forehead against the tank, she lets it flutter to the floor. 

* * *

He pauses the coin mid-sentence after applying the last bit of white paint to the duck’s head. He’s been listening to her coins more since she stopped talking. Since she locked herself in her room. He’s worried about her, of course he is, but if she needs her space he’s going to give it to her.

But he misses the sound of her voice, so while he whittles and worries he listens to the tales she recorded cycles and cycles ago. He has them memorized by now, but it doesn’t matter. She rereads books too, right? So it’s cool. It’s soothing, hearing her voice read a familiar tale, even if she herself is just down the hall, but behind a closed door.

He slips the coin in his pocket. Tomorrow he’ll listen to number twelve, he thinks. He hasn’t listened to that one in a while.

* * *

He’s sitting alone under a slightly scorched tree on the grassy quad of the moonbase.  

“Hi Magnus, it's me, oh and Fischer too, say hi Fischer” there's a bright trilling note “and I hope you're doing okay wherever you are listening to this.” The voice pauses. “Okay, so this is that story about the two ladies who stopped a disease and fell in love? We read that on the beach once, yeah? Here we go — ”

He presses the coin’s face again and it falls silent. He turns it over and over in his hands. It's the first time he's been able to hear her voice coming from it since…. 

“Hello sir!” Angus’s voice jolts him out of his memories. “What do you have there?”

“It’s a book that Lucretia, the Director, that she read for me, you know, before?”

“That’s neat! Are there more somewhere?”

He reaches up and grabs Angus’s hat just so he can ruffle the boy’s hair, but once he stands, he gently places the hat back on the kid’s head.

“Let’s find out, Ango Django,” he says.

They find her in her office, mostly rebuilt, working her way through a tall stack of papers. When she looks up, her expression is closed and wary. 

“Magnus?” It's the Director’s tone. 

He takes the coin out his pocket and sets it on the desk. She visibly flinches. 

“Oh.” A small soft sound. “Yes. Leon told me.”

They share a look and for a moment her office is filled with a familiar silent weight.

“Mister Magnus said you might have the other ones?” asks Angus, his voice cutting through all of that.

They walk through the dusty corridors of the Starblaster together; Magnus almost takes her hand out of habit only newly-remembered. 

Angus runs his hand along the walls as he trails behind them, his eyes wide. “Wow,” he whispers.

The coins spill across the comforter as Magnus upends the box onto the bed.

“Yup, yup, yeah. Wow. Ok.” He picks them up, each one numbered. “Not sure I remember which one has which stories on it.”

“It’ll be a great surprise, sir!” says Angus. Magnus and Lucretia share an amused look over the boy’s head. “If there’s any blanks, do you think we could make one for the Caleb Cleveland books? Because then you could keep reading them even after I go off to school. I mean, if you would want to keep reading them, sir.”

Magnus just puts a hand on the kid’s shoulder, because he’s afraid he might cry if he tries to say anything at all.

“And if there aren’t any,” says Lucretia, “maybe you can talk to Mister Bluejeans about making some more. I bet he’d love to show you how they work.”

“Do you think so, ma’am?”

She nods and smiles, and Angus beams at them both.

* * *

The mail arrives in Ravens Roost with three separate packages for Magnus Burnsides.

Three books wrapped in Taako Brand Wrapping Paper: Volumes I & II of Sizzle It Up, the cookbook, along with a translation of the latest Caleb Cleveland novel into Elvish. 

A stack of coins containing more books in the same series, narrated by one Angus McDonald, the World’s Greatest Detective and Student of Magic.

A single coin with the number 11, its edges worn and its surface faded.

He puts the cookbooks in the kitchen. He knows most of the recipes by heart of course, at least the ones you can do without magic. But it’s sweet of Taako to send him signed copies.

The novel in Elvish goes on the table next to his armchair for slow reading at night by the fire. The audio versions go in a pile with rest of the coins in the workshop; he listens to them while he does woodworking.

He presses the 11 and lets Lucretia’s voice fill the room. Just a letter, nothing special, but he runs his thumb around the edge of the coin, and the corners of his mouth turn up in a smile.


End file.
